Escaping Death

Ace

“T, are we all set for tonight’s meeting? Did we get a location yet?”

Tate doesn’t bother to look up from his phone when he responds to me, his focus remains intently on his screen. “Yes and no. No to the first, yes to the second.”

Always with the word games making my fucking head spin. He knows I hate the riddles, it wastes time I don’t have and only leaves me agitated and with a migraine.

“Tate,” I bark at him to snap his focus off of his device for five seconds, “English, please.”

Tate begrudgingly turns his head in my direction, peeling his eyes away from his phone at the last possible second. “We got a location for the meeting you’re referring to. They want to meet out by the mill.”

I probe him with an arched brow because I know there’s a ‘but’ punctuating his sentence.

“But, we just received a request from another client. The notes were that it was an urgent matter, money is no object — meeting needs to happen tonight.”

“Location?”

Tate scrolls through his phone, tabbing in and out of spreadsheets and other files to find what he’s looking for. “Caligo. It’s a club here in the city. I think Dean and Eli have been there before.” A smirk creeps at the corners of his mouth as he says this but whatever private joke he’s grinning about he doesn’t share it with me.

I inhale a deep breath, heating the air with my inner flames before blowing the smoke out of my nose as I think about how I want to handle this. Dean jumps over the back of the couch and lands next to Tate, giving him a small bounce that momentarily jostles his grip on his phone, earning Dean a death glare from Tate. Eli follows in behind him coughing dramatically as he fans the air to dissipate the smoke.

“We’ll need to split up. I can’t blow off this meeting, it’s been set for weeks. And this new one has me intrigued.” I can’t put my finger on why, but my wolf agrees with me that this isn’t a meeting we will want to miss.

“You take Dean and Eli to Caligo, H and I can handle the mill.”

“Oh fuck yes!” Eli cheers obnoxiously and fist bumps Dean victoriously.

Tate’s eyes are still focused on the screen as he scrolls through making his notes but the tension in his jaw doesn’t escape my notice.

“You don’t approve?” I challenge him to argue with me.

“It’s not that.” He turns his body and perches himself on the armrest of the couch, now facing me directly and awarding me his full, undivided attention. “If this were a regular assignment it wouldn’t be an issue. But these are both extremely guarded clients, on whom I can gather next to no information even despite my probes in the Underdark. I would prefer to be at both meetings, but if you insist on us making both then we have no choice but to split.”

He may be rightfully concerned, we look to him to organize and assess the jobs we take on, he researches and vets all the clients before we meet so we never have to walk in to a meeting completely blind – and now I’m asking him to do just that with not one but two prospective clients.

Ultimately, though, it’s not his decision. It’s mine. And I say we hit both.

“Good. We’re heading out now then. Text me with problems.” Turning my back on them to walk away I shout one final command over my shoulder, “Dean’s in charge and remember you’re at the club for a job not to fuck around.”

My wolf is pacing slowly through my mind, impatient and restless. I’ll be glad when this night is over and we know what kind of jobs we’re facing.

Dean

An hour after Ace and H take off Tate, Eli, and I are all ready to head over to the club. Our meeting isn’t for another hour yet, but we don’t get to venture out to Caligo often so we are going to milk this opportunity for all its worth.

“You want to walk or drive?” I pose the question to either of the guys.

“We should drive over. If Ace needs backup we can leave quickly.” Tate retorts like he’s the responsible one of us.

“Shotgun,” Eli declares as he throws the car keys at me with no warning.

Tate sighs as he stands, straightening his tie and rubbing the non-existent wrinkles from his dress pants. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Lighten up, baby bro,” I slap Tate in the center of his back, “this is going to be fun.”

Gods I’ve missed this place. It’s still early in the night, by Caligo standards, but already things are heating up on the dance floor. Tate and Eli join me in the sitting area in the back corner of the club away from the bar and club-goers.

“Tell me we’re not going to sit here all night,” Eli groans.

I look askance at him, “nothing wrong with watching.”

There’s something about watching other people enjoying themselves, maybe they know people are watching, maybe they don’t, either way I see them. I see the grips tightening around hips, fingertips pressing harder into soft, supple skin. I see the fluttering of closing eyes as a shiver of pleasure courses through them silently but not unseen. I wonder what exactly they’re feeling, I wonder what it was that finally made them give in to that feeling. Was it his lips on her neck, his breath on the shell of her ear? Was it feeling his hardness pressed between the globes of her ass?

“You two can sit and watch, I’m going to actually enjoy myself.” Eli says with no malice, his gaze locked on a target.

I follow his line of vision over to the bar where two of the most beautiful women I have ever seen are working behind the bar. One has impossibly white hair which shines like a gem when the scarce smattering of light hits it. The other has dark brown hair, almost black, but the same face as the other girl. I don’t think they’re twins, sisters most likely.

“They’re out of your league,” Tate muses, finally finding a reason to smile and enjoy his time here. “Not only are they gorgeous, they work here. You don’t have a chance in hell.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Eli postures with an arrogant grin. “I get a taste of her sweet honey and you’ve got to live 48 hours without your phone.”

Tate visibly tenses but only for a fraction of a second, he really doesn’t want to agree to those terms but he won’t back down from a bet, especially one from Eli. “When she shuts you down, you can’t shift for a week.”

A sinister look flares behind Eli’s eyes, they flash black for a moment and then return to their normal deep brown color. I don’t know what it’s like to have a wolf like he does, to have another soul communicating with you and trying to fight you for control, but I’ve known Ace and Eli long enough to know that right now Eli’s wolf is not happy about the prospect of being caged for a week.

“Tate don’t bring Stone into this,” I make the half-hearted attempt to spare Eli’s wolf from paying the price of Eli’s stupidity.

“You’re so fucking on,” Eli bellows over me at Tate and with his casual arrogance he begins to approach the two ladies at the bar.

He may be the youngest of us, but I have to hand it to Eli, he’s never one to deny himself the things he wants. He’s always trying to live his life to the fullest extent, sometimes to his own detriment. Perhaps it’s a coping mechanism for what happened, but we’ve all got our own baggage and our own skeletons so we don’t stand in his way when he fills whatever void he’s living with.

“How much longer until the meeting?” I ask Tate, while Eli sits at the bar and starts talking up the dark haired beauty.

“Thirty minutes or so.”

“How are we supposed to meet in here? Is there a back room or something?”

Tate shakes his head and points towards the ceiling across the club. “VIP lounge upstairs. It’s usually just for the owners and their family and friends, but I guess whoever Syble is, she's got enough clout to be granted access for this meeting.”

“What do we know about her?”

“Like I told Ace, next to nothing. None of the hunters know anyone by that name, the only thing I could find was some wolves mentioning a Syble being the mate to an Alpha from another pack but that was over a hundred years ago.”

“Hmm, that’s odd isn’t it. I’m sure it’ll be fine though, this place is public enough. Oh shit, Tate, you may be losing your own bet.” I nod towards where Eli’s mystery woman is leading him by the hand over to dance.

“Dancing doesn’t win him the bet,” Tate sulks but I keep my attention on Eli and his girl. She’s truly stunning. She’s got an attractive figure, curves exactly where I like them, a poundable ass and fuckable tits. But it’s how she moves, how she carries herself that has me transfixed. Her shoulders are squared back with confidence, she doesn’t arch her back to make her breasts more pronounced. Either she doesn’t know how stunning she is or she doesn’t care, but one thing is certain – I wish for the first time in a long time that I wasn’t just watching.

I want to be the one pressed against her, I want to feel her strong, curvy body beneath my fingertips. I want to know what her heat feels like and how sweet her nectar tastes. Eli is getting closer to winning his bet. His hand is halfway into her waistband and she’s doing absolutely nothing to stop him from going further.

When they spin around to face me again I’m surprised to catch the sight of her pulling his hand out of her shorts, pressing into him for a passionate kiss, and then she disappears in the dark beyond my sight.

Tate grins victoriously for a moment before the curl of his lip falters and confusion mars his face. He continues to look at something out in the club, his confusion morphing into surprise and intrigue, but I still can’t make out what he would find so fascinating.

“Why’d she cockblock you? From my seat here, things looked like they were going well,” I tease Eli when he joins us back over in the sitting area.

He turns back towards the dance floor, no doubt in search of his Cinderella, and chews on his bottom lip when he’s unsuccessful. “No clue, she just said that she had to go and then she disappeared.”

“Poor Stone,” Tate taunts Eli.

“Fuck that, it was a draw. You claimed she would shut me down, but her tongue down my throat says otherwise.” Eli throws back at him with a cocksure grin.

Tate opens his mouth to retaliate but the alarm on his watch lights up in the darkness as conspicuously as a fox in a henhouse, drawing complaints from nearby club patrons for him to turn it off so they can continue their illicit acts of fornication.

“Time to meet,” Tate announces and then gestures for us to lead the way towards the staircase that will deliver us to the VIP lounge.